I don't expect to see competitive RISC-V servers any time soon

This seems like an awfully clueless post. What is "soon"? This year? No. Within five years? Yes. Ten years could well see >50% share.

Ten years ago there was no Aarch64 chip available from anyone. The iPhone 5s came out in September 2013, Android phones early 2015, the first SBCs (e.g. Pi 3 and Odroid C2) in 2016 -- just 7 years ago.

Now Arm makes up 25% of AWS.

The RISC-V Linux kernel, gcc & llvm, Debian and Ubuntu are all in fine shape for generic C/C++ datacenter stuff. All the interpreted languages are there, the things with their own JITs are in the worst shape because they are the only things that need a lot of special RISC-V work (given gcc and llvm are long done) but coming along nicely.

There are a ton of "Raspberry PI" size and cost RISC-V boards now, with quad core 1.5 GHz dual-issue JH7110 SoC (like Pi 3) or quad core 1.85 GHz OoO TH1520 SoC (like Pi 4).

There is a server chip (SG2042) available RIGHT NOW that has similar cores to the first Graviton generation four years ago, but 64 cores per chip instead of 16. You can get it on a single-socket board today, and dual- and quad-socket boards are coming within months. That's up to 256 cores, hundreds of GB of RAM, lots of PCIe, lots of L3 cache.

The $100 TH1520 boards make a great development device for things to run on the SG2042 as they have the same C910 CPU cores.

RISC-V chips in the same class as current (or very recent) x86 and Apple M1 will be available for development purposes NEXT YEAR and in mass production in 2025 or 2026.

Is RISC-V going to take over entire datacentres? No, of course not. Is it going to have a significant and growing place in them within the next five years? Yes.

Generally I think this is fairly true. The ecosystem has a ton of matyring/growth to do before it has competitive mainstream offerings.

Pulp folks' Occamy is supposedly going to get a run of chips made this summer. 432 cores, each with an incredibly innovative vector processor. Really tapping those vector cores takes effort, & floating point isn't what most servers need/use, but this is still one very rapidly approaching very interesting data point, a huge step function where RISC-V could leap to the front. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/432-core-occamy-cpu-for-us... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35873153